Sports deliver stories, and stories connect people. At its best, the connection is captivating, a shared link of enthusiasm and excitement.

The Syracuse men’s basketball team, NCAA champions as of Monday night, delivered countless stories this season, and many of those stories have already been told.

There’s another layer of stories, though, that remain untold. Not about players or coaches. Not about histories or futures. Not even about teams and opponents. These are stories simply about people and their memories. These are the stories that connect.

*

Everybody here is tired. A security guard by the entrance of Nottingham High School slowly bends his neck toward a cup of coffee, caffeine for 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. Absences are way up, students say.

Adrenaline kept Roseanne Dempsey, a secretary in the principal’s office, up until 3:20 Tuesday morning, hours after the Syracuse men’s basketball team captured its first national title. That means Dempsey is working on two hours sleep.

Yet somehow, it’s the best day of the year.

“I woke up this morning,” Dempsey says, “and there were two inches of snow on the ground. But as far as I was concerned, it was beautiful and sunny.”

Dempsey is like many Syracuse residents. She’s fallen in love with the Orangemen. After SU’s victory Feb. 15 against Notre Dame, she predicted a national championship. She swears.

“Even so,” she says, “those last three minutes, I was very nervous. If I had a valium in the house, I’d have taken it.”

Then again, this year’s players — the ones to whom she refers strictly by first names: ‘Melo, Gerry, Kueth — haven’t let her down all year, so why would they possibly start then? Not a chance.

And when Dempsey read the morning announcements yesterday, she thanked them for it.

*

Clutching his walker, 87-year-old Seymour Feldman reclines in a chair, the same chair in which, Monday, he watched the most exciting basketball game he can remember. But, as he’ll quickly admit, that’s not saying much.

Who’s your favorite player, Seymour?

“What’s his name again?” Feldman says while sitting by the window of his first-floor room at The Oaks, an assisted-living home in DeWitt. “It slipped my mind. Can I look in the paper?”

Rest assured, though, Feldman is a sports fan. Among his other professions, he once worked as a golf pro near Monticello. Until this year, golf remained his primary athletic interest. Then he discovered the Orangemen, and a talented freshman named Carmelo Anthony — oh yeah, that’s his name.

“This season made me a basketball fan,” Feldman says. “I was up late watching, way past my bedtime.”

The Oaks showed the game in the atrium, right down the hall from Feldman’s room, but Feldman opted to watch the game alone, away from, as he put it, “the ladies’ gossip.”

In the process of watching, he discovered one other pleasure.

“They showed a picture of Jim Boeheim’s wife sitting in the audience,” says Feldman, leaning closer, as if ready to tell a secret. “She’s very pretty.”

*

Brian Connors, a 12-year-old from Scranton, Pa., couldn’t get tickets to the Final Four. Never mind that he’s Gerry McNamara’s cousin. Didn’t matter. Too expensive.

Didn’t matter that teachers bombarded him with questions about his suddenly famous relative. Didn’t matter that friends loved his stories about 1-on-1 games with McNamara. Didn’t even matter that Connors himself was a talented basketball player, and a point guard at that.

Just too expensive — way too expensive.

His father, Pat, took the trip down to New Orleans with a handful of other relatives. The fifth-grader, however, stayed home with his mother and two siblings.

“I watched at home,” Connors says, “and it was too late for my friends to come over.”

Tuesday, Connors skipped school and drove two hours north with his mom, younger brother and younger sister to meet McNamara at Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport.

And that’s basically the end of his story, except for one minor detail.

While Connors’ dad was in New Orleans, he won $70,000 from a slot machine at Harrah’s Casino.

“Now my kids have all their catalogs open,” says Connors’ mom, Ann. “They’re pointing at everything like, ‘We need this. We need this.’ ”

With $70,000, Connors knows his family needs at least one thing: a better excuse to keep him from next year’s Final Four.

*

He didn’t hang from trees or toss empty Miller Lite cans, but Corey Mitchell joined the mass of Syracuse students on Marshall Street on Monday night.

But Mitchell is a 34-year-old middle-school teacher.

“As soon as Duany grabbed that last shot,” Mitchell recalls, “I got in my car as fast as I could and ran down to Marshall Street. My wife didn’t want me to go down there, but I didn’t give her enough time to stop me.

“I just had to see it for myself. It was great to see total strangers slapping high-fives.”

Give Mitchell a break, because he, much like so many other Syracuse residents, deserves one. He’s ardently supported the SU program, he says, since the days of Roosevelt Bouie and Louis Orr.

Now, he’s tacked pictures of Hakim Warrick, Anthony and Boeheim on the walls of his classroom in Roxboro Road Middle School.

Typical of a social studies teacher, he even has a lesson — or at least a message — to go along with the images.

“Especially in this time of war, with so much news that is very depressing,” Mitchell says, “this is the kind of thing that can be very uplifting. This is the kind of story our community can cherish.”

*

Monday was John Sansone’s off day. He ended up working 13 hours.

Sansone is the general manager at P.J. Dorsey’s, a restaurant and bar in Armory Square. On Monday night, 300 people — roughly the fireman’s limit — crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the 12 televisions to watch Syracuse play Kansas in the championship game.

“It was absolutely packed,” Sansone says. “Three-hundred people, and they were all going nuts in here. It was like telling 300 people at once that they’d all won the lotto.”

By tip-off, Sansone had to close the doors. No more customers, at least not until others left. Sansone stayed until 2 a.m., making sure the entire operation went smoothly. The 36-year-old, wearing an orange hat with a blue “S,” buzzed around tables, checking on customers while knowing, undoubtedly, that skipping his off day was worth it.

The downside was, he could never pay close attention to the game.

“I was real excited that SU won,” he says. “But I probably would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t doing my job.

“That said, it’s fun throwing the best party you possibly can — and that’s my job. It’s fantastic to see everyone having a great time, and I know for a fact that this town did.”

Published on April 8, 2003 at 12:00 pm